zidouta.com

‘Qamile Stema, 88, a so-called sworn virgin, scolds relatives for not visiting her often enough.’

IHT, Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania:

“Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly sixty years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

Had she been born in Albania today, says the 78-year-old sworn virgin, who made an oath of celibacy in return for the right to live and rule her family as a man, she would choose womanhood.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

Sworn virgins became the patriarchs of their families, with all the trappings of male authority, by swearing to remain virgins for the rest of their lives.”

‘Le Roi de la Capote [Charlotte] Publicité préservatif’ (video – Adrants), ter gelegenheid van Wereld Aids Dag.

Scentific American, The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure:

“Achieving sexual climax requires a complex conspiracy of sensory and psychological signals—and the eventual silencing of critical brain areas”

Sean Flynn on GQ Blog, Papa:

“”You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)”

Lauren Berlant in The Nation, Against Sexual Scandal:

“Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there’s a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? Some of the response to Craig was like the response to moralists like Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard and now Spitzer–moralists deserve to suffer the same force of negative judgment they wielded on others. Shame on us? Shame on you, ha ha! But lots of the response was sheer homophobia. And all of it was sheer erotophobia.”

Telegraph, Dolphins woo females with bunches of weeds:

“A new study shows that male dolphins carry pieces of plants and twigs to impress females, rather than simply playful behaviour as previously believed.

Object-carrying as part of sexual display is rare in the animal kingdom, with only humans and chimpanzees doing anything similar.”

Bibliothèque Nationale, L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au secret (pdf):

Dans les années 1830, les ouvrages imprimés dits « contraires aux bonnes moeurs » publiés sous le manteau, poursuivis ou condamnés, sont séparés du reste des collections de la Bibliothèque royale et rassemblés afin de constituer une section distincte intitulée Enfer et conservée à la Réserve des livres rares. Quelques années plus tard, le cabinet des Estampes procède à l’identique.

Dès lors, l’Enfer devient un lieu mythique, objet de toutes les curiosités et de tous les fantasmes. Pour la première fois, la Bibliothèque nationale de France expose cette part obscure de ses collections et lève le voile sur l’Enfer.

Info: 04 décembre 2007 – 02 mars 2008. Site François-Mitterrand / Grande Galerie. Dossier de presse, een pdf met kleine plaatjes.

The Independent, Sex please! (we’re French): Paris’s dirty secret:

“The “Enfer” section of the Bibliothèque Nationale – books and prints and photographs purchased, confiscated or donated over almost two centuries – is believed to be one of the largest and richest collections of pornographic and erotic materials in the world. The Vatican’s secret stash is said to be even larger but that, presumably, will never be opened to the public.

How strong can this stuff be? Given what appears daily on the internet, on cable TV, or in the pages of the Daily Sport, is it possible to be shocked by exquisite, but explicit, 17th-century porn?

The answer is, yes. The exhibition is an eye-opener: a quietly and intelligently displayed but garish cornucopia of sadism, masochism, bestialism, scatology, bums, tits and staring genitalia. It is also a fascinating, and sometimes beautiful, expedition through the dark, winding corridors of the human psyche.”

IHT, In Japan, it’s the men who want to be skinny and cute:

“Both Shirakawa and his girlfriend like the fact that she weighs more than he does, and is the leader of the couple. “She’s a lot stronger than I am, can lift heavy things and go drinking until dawn. I admire that about her, and feel protected when I’m around her,” he said. Older than he by five years, it was Shirakawa’s girlfriend who made the approach, started the dating process and decided what course their relationship would take.

“Frankly, I think women should be in the driver’s seat. Society and relationships work better that way,” he said. Shirakawa likes to wear his girlfriend’s clothes and often shows up for work wearing her blouse and jeans, to the general approval of his co-workers.

Hirayama said: “For young men, wearing women’s clothes has almost become a status symbol – a confirmation of being slim and pretty and, therefore, desirable. Young women, on the other hand, are less interested now in looking beautiful for the benefit of young men. They dress up for themselves, for their own satisfaction.”"

Extreem rechtse vandalen vernielen The History of Sex. (sic)

New York Times:

“A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.”

Het tinnef in actie op YouTube: Nationalists Action Against Degenerate “Art”

The Smart Set: Sex and the Renaissance Nun.

“Church officials in Venice and Rome turned a blind eye to these activities, but reluctantly investigated some of the most blatant and scandalous cases. The Italian academic Guido Ruggiero has pored over countless documents to find that only 33 convents were prosecuted for “sex crimes against God” (as they were called, since the nuns were in theological terms the brides of Christ). The legal details read like a cheesy Italian soap opera.”

“Prostitutes are known for their skimpy attire, but Kenya’s coastal port of Mombasa is witnessing a controversial fashion makeover.

The twilight ladies, as the city’s residents refer to the sex workers, have traded their revealing outfits for the more austere buibui – a loose, floor-length gown and head covering favoured by Muslim women.”

(…)

Some female residents say it is a big disgrace.

“I feel so embarrassed that sometimes I contemplate removing my buibui and throwing it away. The buibui has lost its respect,” Mariam Salma says.

BBC: Sex clothes anger Kenyan Muslims (via)

Regina Lynn: “It seems to me that the part of cybersex that attracts the most criticism — the absence of touch — is the part that gives it such potential to deepen our understanding of sex.”

Zoo is een film (drama/documentaire) over het leven, de vrienden en de bizare, geruchtmakende dood van Kenneth Pinyan. Deze man uit de buurt van Seattle praktiseerde in gezelschap van gelijkgestemden seks met volwassen hengsten, tot interne verwondingen hem in 2005 tijdens de daad fataal werden.

Ik heb de film nog niet gezien, maar de film, die een prijs won op het Sundance Festival, is naar verluidt anders dan wat de kijker hoopt vreest. Geen ranzige freakshow, geen exploitation. Zoo bevat geen beelden van seks met dieren, is daarentegen zelfs ‘mooi gefilmd, maar lijkt vooral zeer empathisch van opzet. En juist het opschorten van de voor de hand liggende veroordeling van het taboe bestialiteit – er is heus geen te kort aan veroordelingen van zo’n taboe – lijkt nu een zinnige film op te leveren. De drijfveren en de ethische en emotionele rationalisaties van deze mannen komt, nogmaals naar verluidt, op deze wijze naar voren. Tamelijk uniek. En zo kan de kijker uiteindelijk voor zichzelf verklaren waarom bestialiteit een taboe is.

Ik heb geen idee of de film ooit in Nederland zal worden uitgebracht.

Mijn favoriet Dana Stevens besprak de film voor Slate: Zoo’s lyrical reflection on bestiality. (Incluis een Slate Spoiler Special-podcast.) Meer recensies via Metacritics.

Noorderlog: “Een wespentaille alleen is dus niet genoeg. Om bouwvakkers aan het fluiten te krijgen moeten de dames daarnaast ook hun heupen in de strijd gooien. ”

“En voor de mannen geldt precies het tegenovergestelde. Om aantrekkelijk gevonden te worden moeten ze niet al te veel taille hebben. Maar ze moeten daarnaast ook niet te veel met hun heupen wiegen en juist wel hun schouders in de strijd gooien.”

Of je moet als man zijnde John Travolta heten. John Travolta Shakes His Money Maker on Ellen.

“Anal Sex Is Increasingly Popular in the Hetero World.” New York Magazine

• BBC NEWS | Health | Time for rethink on the clitoris
  “For two millennia it was a “little hill” – the meaning of kleitoris, its root word in Greek.
  But an Australian urologist, Dr Helen O’Connell, has revealed that the clitoris is shaped more like a mountain than a hill.”
  (tags: female clitoris sex)
• anachronism unltd
  “Current affairs, (Garden) History, Art & Architecture”
  (tags: weblog art history gardens architecture henk)
• Windows Vista Beta: A lot like Mac OS X – Lifehacker
  “After playing around with my newly-installed copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 for a couple of hours, the thought that kept popping up in my head over and over again like a persistent mole was: “Wow, that’s a lot like the Mac.”"
  (tags: os osx vista)